Photo Editing Software and Applications

"Adobe Photoshop is the industry leader when it comes to PC and Mac image editing software. Image editing is not something readily associated with mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, but Adobe Photoshop Express is a free app available for Apple devices that enables you to edit and share images from your device.

The app couples up with Photoshop.com. Adobe's online photo editing and sharing site, and makes it possible to not only edit images on your idevice, but also share them online. There are a wide range of basic editing tools available such as cropping, straightening, flipping and rotating, and it is also possible to adjust colour levels, saturation and other image settings."

"When photographers 1st start using Photoshop, it is so fun and exciting and over-editing often occurs. Here are the top mistakes often made and how to avoid them.

As a result, many start out playing with filters and plug-ins and over-use them. Sometimes photographers feel Photoshop is all powerful and take images that should have been in a reject pile, and they try to “save” them. As a rule, Photoshop should not be used to save unacceptable photos. If a photo is out of focus, blown out, severely under-exposed, or has really awkward composition, Photoshop will not make it drastically better.  Used in excess, it can actually make the image worse.

Some things like selective color definitely can fall into fads or cliches, meaning they were over-used for a period of time. While selective color edits occasionally look great, more often than not, it is overdone.  The best example I can think of is when a photo is turned black and white and the eyes are colored back to blue."

"If you’re moving from Photoshop CS5 or CS6 to Photoshop CC you may be tempted to clean up your computer and remove the older Photoshop version from it. After all there’s no point leaving it there if you’re not using it is there? Well I, for one, won’t be removing Photoshop CS5 anytime soon and I suggest you think twice about removing your older version too.

Adobe axed Picture Package quite a long time ago but it could be easily made to work with Photoshop CS5. For a time there I also had it running with Photoshop CS6 until an update to CS6 permanently knocked it out. So, because I like to use Picture Package for assembling images and because it works just fine with Photoshop CS5, I’ll be keeping that version"

With the KB Covers Photoshop Keyboard Cover, your Photoshop projects will get edited faster because you can spend more time working on your project and lesss time memorizing the program shortcut keys.

"This news might not be very relevant to most of you, but Adobe has announced that future versions of Photoshop will not be compatible with Windows XP. The Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP. (Photoshop CS6 does not support Windows Vista.) In addition, all subsequent Photoshop feature updates specifically for Creative Cloud members will no longer support Windows XP."

"Martin Evening on how to create a high-key portrait.

The retouching work started in Lightroom, where I chose to add a blue cast and lighten the corners. I retouched this image using the Vignetting Amount slider in the Lens Corrections panel to apply the corner lightening. However, since Lightroom 3 and Camera Raw 6 the Effects panel can be used to apply a more controlled lightening (or darkening) vignette effect. I then used Photoshop for the remaining retouching and added a shadow mask layer to produce the rippled lighting effect seen in the final version."

Mike Hoffman demonstrates how to extract images from a white background using simple channels techniques.

If you’re creating image composites, and especially if you’re working with stock images, you’ll find yourself needing to extract image elements from a white background. This can be a straightforward task with Photoshop, and often you’ll get better results with some of the old school techniques."

onOne Software has recently announced Perfect Photo Suite 8, a photo editing toolset that functions either as a standalone app, or as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, and Apple Aperture. The company has also unveiled a public beta, allowing you the chance to play with all the tools before the software goes live in November.

Perfect Enhance module ­– Perfect Enhance provides essential tools for basic enhancements. Use it to adjust brightness and contrast, remove a color cast, remove dust spots and power lines, and add sharpening and vignettes. It is an ideal module to start with when using Perfect Photo Suite 8 as a standalone application or when quick corrections are needed.

Perfect Batch Utility ­– Powerful batch processing of actions from one or multiple modules, including the insertion of a watermark.

"Learn how to create this beautiful moonlight scene in Photoshop. This tutorial will teach you many great Photoshop techniques such as how to easily mask complex objects using channels, create your own astrophotography-like skies, and add surreal colors to the whole image. A PSD is also included with this tutorial. Read this tutorial and learn how to create your own surreal moonlight photo manipulations!"

In this tutorial, we will explain how to create a highly entertaining and detailed caricature illustration. We will explain how to properly contorl all the elements of a composition including color balance, contrast, textures, and more, as well as all of the tools and techniques that you need to know in Photoshop.

This tutorial also includes a speed painting video.

Adobe has released Photoshop version 14.1 for Creative Cloud, a free update that includes a new tool called Generator for dynamically exporting assets from a project as individual image files. Generator arrives as an open source project. One automatically exports image assets into a special directory, while the other connects to Adobe’s Edge Reflow tool for responsive Web.

The exporting plugin works by generating asset files once a filetype has been appended to a layer group. As edits are made to the PSD file, Generator will update files in the background so that you don’t have to worry about re-exporting or using out-of-date files.